The Intersection of Innovation and Contemporary Living

Gmail Hiccups

Ever since Google turned on IMAP in Gmail I have noticed some general service weirdness that is not easily explained:

1) Performance has swung from great to unusable in the online version. Today it’s moderately slow.

2) IMAP with Apple Mail is generally reliable but unreliable with enough frequency to make me cross my fingers when I open it. I’ve had to rebuild my mailbox twice in the last month in an attempt to right things.

3) Performance in IMAP is terrible, I am right now downloading messages into my inbox at a data rate of between 25-190k. It is also wanting to download far more messages than are in my inbox and folders, which I presume means it is downloading spam messages as well. Were it not for the fact that POP ain’t great in Gmail either, I’d go back to that.

4) For reasons I cannot explain, Google Groups has been having hiccups delivering messages to me. A couple of weeks ago I received this automatic message from Groups: “Over the past several days, Google Groups has had difficulty delivering messages to your email address (jnolan@gmail.com). We’re sending this message to see if your email address is once again accepting mail.”. Which indeed was something I noticed because groups I subscribe to we not generating their usual message traffic but I could see the messages in the Groups web interface.